We LOOOOVE bronze…

Oh wait…no we don’t!  As I have mentioned before, I love our kitchen cabinets…I am NOT a fan of the bronze handles that had attached themselves TO our cabinets.  Since cabinet handles fall in one of those categories of “small items that can get silly expensive if you don’t keep your eye on them”, we thought we’d try our hand at giving them a quick little paint first.

I am a sucker for Rustoleum.  I think they make some very innovative products and their spray paint just WORKS.  I headed to Menards (which has 2 full aisles devoted SOLELY to Rustoleum products…heaven) to pick out our new cabinet pulls.  After reviewing the options, I decided that I wanted to do something a little more subdued than the metallic spray paint I used for my light makeover.  I decided to give the hammered silver spray paint a try.  As an exciting bonus, it was on sale!  You know I love a good deal….

I tried out some different options.  You can see the original handle on the far left.  The 2nd from the left is hammered spray paint over the brass, the 3rd from the left is the metallic (with gray primer) and the last one is hammered (with gray primer).  We decided we liked the hammered over the brass best.  It gave it a nice subtle finish while keeping it in the “brushed nickel” hue of our door knobs.

With the color dilemma settled,  I headed outside to do some painting on the patio.  I laid all the knobs out on cardboard when the wind came up…not wanting my knobs to blow away, I took a small bit of packing tape and attached it to both ends of the knobs to keep it in place.  I have read other people attaching the knobs to the cardboard with the screws that held them into the cupboards, but this seemed like an unnecessary amount of work.  I didn’t have a problem with my trusty packing tape.  After I had them all laid out, I decided it would probably be a good idea to wash them first since a few were sticky from who knows what.  I make a white vinegar/warm water mixture and cleaned these guys up before I re-stuck them to their tape homes.

 I did a light coat like the can suggested and then went inside to distract myself with other things so I wouldn’t sit and watch paint dry.  Once they were mostly dry, I turned them on their side to make sure I could get an even coat.  After I applied all 3 coats, I covered it with a Satin Finish Clear-Coat (also from Rustoleum).  We left them outside to dry and when we brought them in we were really bummed…it looked like the Nebraska wind had blown the “hammered” finish straight off the handles.  We were left with some silverish handles that looked REALLY plasticky.

In an effort to save my little project, I took them into the garage (with the door wide open) and sprayed one last, heavier, coat on the knobs.  This seemed to do the trick.  The hammered texture came through and once they dried, I applied another coat of clear-coat to seal them in and hopefully make them more durable.  I brought them back in and got to work putting them all back on the cabinets.
 We got them installed just in time for our Easter weekend company!

Just a small update that makes us walk into our kitchen and not notice our handles.  Sounds silly to do that much work and not notice them, but now we notice our gorgeous cabinets and countertops and don’t pay any attention to the knobs.  Prior to the facelift, we’d walk in the kitchen and say, “Man, I hate bronze”…and bronze is enjoying the break from being ragged on constantly

The best part?  This project was INCREDIBLY cheap and easy.  I painted 36 kitchen knobs and still have plenty of spray paint left to tackle the rest of the pulls in the house (bathrooms, laundry room, etc).  Cost breakdown?
Hammered Rustoleum- $5.98
Rustoleum Clear Coat- $2.98
Grand total- $9.00

Sweet!  I will take that any day of the week!  Are you a fan of quick and easy make-overs?  Do you have a weird love of Rustoleum like I do?  I’d love to hear about it!

I linked up with Thrifty Decor Chick

Call me crazy…

You might recall that we have a RED brick fireplace in our house…it has rubbed me the wrong way since we moved in.  Once our new carpet was installed, the red brick became even more noticeable.  In the midst of our landscaping project, I got the wild notion that the fireplace was due for a face lift.  The rain of last week became the perfect incentive we needed to stay inside and do a bit of painting.  (It was also where I got the inspiration for the new blog name, about half way through the project I said to Steve, “you know, we really have a lot of theories about how this stuff should work, but it doesn’t really work like that…” and the new title was born)  We read up on a LOT of tutorials and looked at a lot of before/after pictures as we were getting up the nerve to tackle this fairly irreversible project.

To start with, I wiped down the fireplace, mostly to get up any cobwebs/dust that might be on the bricks.  Our fireplace is gas, so we didn’t really have to worry about making sure the soot was wiped up…there wasn’t any!  We read that oil based primer is the way to go on brick…so even though I hate painting with oil based, we headed to Lowe’s and picked some up.  We ended up with KILZ Odorless Primer.  As a side note, I was pleasantly surprised with how odorless it really ended up being!

 Steve was not happy I decided to take yet another picture before he could dive in…I just wanted you to fully appreciate the red brick in all its glory.

Me posing with the in progress primed fireplace…it’s about this time we both had a small panic attack about what we were doing.  My advice if you are tackling a painting of the fireplace, don’t panic halfway through…primer never looks good (even if you are going to paint it white and the primer is white, it’s not the same thing, I promise).  We reasoned it was too late to stop and our best course of action was to keep going (we did jump back online and revisit some photos to give us the courage we needed to persevere)

Here it is after the first coat.  We ended up going with Valspar “Frosty White” in Semi-Gloss (latex).  We were feeling better about the outcome…but I was nervous about painting the bottom.  You see, in our plan to install carpet, I neglected to think about the painting impact to the fireplace.  The carpet goes right up to the brick, so getting it to look finished without painting our carpet was going to be quite the challenge.   Again, I took a deep breath and jumped in.  (Ignore the paint swatches over the fireplace…I was playing with some free Valspar paint samples and ruled out the results)

Yep, I basically painted the bottom of the fireplace with my head upside down so I could see any drips before they happened.  This took me as long to do as it did to paint the entire rest of the fireplace.  I dripped one time on the carpet, but thanks to the quick catch, latex paint, and multi-color carpet, it was quickly disguised.

All done…It has grown on us quite a bit, and we think once we get rid of the ugly blues on top of the fireplace and paint our desired color, it will look a lot better.  I also bought some Rust-oleum high heat black spray paint to do the fireplace front and rid our poor fireplace of its bronze exterior.  I’m also thinking we may need to paint the back of our built ins to break up the room a bit….the jury is still out on that one.

Now for the lessons learned part of the broadcast…We started with a small roller and a medium sized paintbrush.  It became apparent that for the groves of our fireplace, we needed something that could get in the mortar and really paint.  I ended up buying some cheap “chip brushes” at Lowes.  The short bristles helped control any possible paint splatter and they fit in the cracks perfectly.  Since they were so cheap, I tossed them when I was done.   The only bad part was their cheapness meant the bristles fell out from time to time…I kept an eye out and rescued the lost bristle before it dried itself in my fireplace.  A minor annoyance for the convenience of the chip brush!

What do you think  step in the right direction?  Horrible mistake and I need to call the mason right away to come install some new red brick?  Love the brass?  Suggestions on what to do with the bookcases?  We need all the help we can get on this one…

Update- We have finished our fireplace!  And definitely don’t put latex paint over oil based primer…the brick will feel sticky like it never really dried.  :-)

Happy Easter Weekend!

We celebrated Easter this weekend by having our families join us for dinner.  My parents, Kimberly and Nathanael came down Friday and hung out with us for the weekend.  I put them to work on several projects (stay tuned for those details) and come Sunday we hosted dinner with Steve’s parents as well.  It was so nice to be able to finally have our family over to our house and have enough space for everyone to comfortably visit, cook, and eat.  Plus, it gave us some incentive to clean up a bit and see how nice our house can look when it’s not in project chaos.  We were a little worried on Friday when we couldn’t find the bolts to the kitchen table, but we found those after we put together the air hockey table and discovered we had spares….So Easter dinner was served in our new dining room on an actual table.  I also discovered a few short comings in my “hostessing items” including: a gravy boat, a gravy ladle, a water pitcher, serving spoons, and a tablecloth…but we made do.  Officially added to my Target shopping list!

We made an awesome dinner — ham, mashed potatoes, green been casserole, ciabatta mozzarella bread,  and strawberry pie for dessert.  YUM!!!  (and yummie leftovers too!)

Steve carving the ham with our electric knife.  It worked like a charm!
 Mashin’ some potatoes

Our Easter table

Getting ready to eat!

We decided to take a group photo on the front step…thanks tree for being perfectly placed!

Family photo on the step (you can see our planter project behind us)

And yes, it’s impossible to get Kirby to look at the camera…this might be the only picture I have of his cute little face looking at the camera….

There you have it!  Easter dinner was a success!   (and no, the house is not clean anymore…right after our house guests left, we got right to work on a muddy mess…details on that definitely coming soon as well)

It’s magic

I have no other words, it’s magic!  Our kitchen cabinets are a gorgeous redwood color and we love them.  We were worried though because the cupboards have taken QUITE a beating over the years and we were afraid we were going to have to paint them to get them to look nice.  Take a side detour with me now…way a long time ago, my parents built their house.  They had carpet installed and after the installers left, my mom noticed that the brand new oak wood trim was scratched EVERYWHERE.  She immediately called the carpet installers and asked them to fix the problem.  They came back out and brought with them the magic wood fixer.  It’s a little stick that you rub on minor scratches and away they go.  Seriously, vanish from sight.  15 years later, my mom still has that original stick.  Hoping I could find it in the store, I gave my parents a call to get the name on the can of the magic stick.

It’s called a Tibet Almond Stick.  We drove to Ace Hardware and purchased it for $4.50.  We came back home and set to work washing off the cabinets.  I used a mixture of  white vinegar and warm water and then promptly dried them with a soft cloth.  I then took my Almond stick and starting going over the cabinets.  Like magic, the majority of the dings and scratches went away!  I tried to take photos, but my camera isn’t good enough to truly capture the difference.
 Here is the before shot, you can see a lot of rub marks and dings in the door.
 Then, a few rubs of the almond stick and they are shiny, scratches virtually gone.  I have done all the lower cabinets and am starting to work on the upper cabinets.  The whole process takes a bit, but the results are DEFINITELY worth it.

The package says that it won’t work on deep scratches, and I have definitely found that to be true.  It also won’t work on something that isn’t real wood…so processed wood, etc. will not be able to be fixed.  Thanks you Zenith Tibet Almond stick for saving my kitchen cabinets!!!!

Our Dirty Little Secrets

On our final walk through of our house, we discovered that our house had a dirty little secret hiding in the yard under the now melted snow.  We saw tunnels and what we were sure was moles.  Well, we knew there was a way to take care of this, so it was no reason to halt our closing (especially after everything up to this point).  As you may remember, we got the call to close while we were on the walk through, so after we hit up the bank for a certified check and Starbucks for our closing beverage, we stopped at Home Depot to get what we needed to tell those moles that WE were moving in and THEY were going to need to move on out of our yard.  While we were perusing the options, our friendly Home Depot employee asked if we had Moles or Voles.  We shrugged and said we assumed moles.  As he talked on, it became clear that what we had observed was actually Voles.  He also informed us how “lucky” we were because voles are much harder to get rid of than moles.  Great.  Then we were off to purchase our dream house with the vole infested backyard.

We researched voles like it was our job.  I found no mention of what to do about yard pests in any of the blogs I read.  Apparently, this is just a dirty dirty secret that no one talks about.

What is a vole you ask?  I will save you the trip to wikipedia, it looks like a big field mouse and behaves like a mole and a mouse.  So yes, it tunnels, eats roots of trees, shrubs and plants and also runs above ground (though generally not until after dark).  They breed in the summer and generally live about 6 months.  There was a LOT of consensus among the internet at the pest control professionals I called…the best thing to do is get rid of their food source IMMEDIATELY.  Off we went to tear up the landscaping…it was all dead anyway, so this wasn’t too sad (or too hard actually).

 Kirby so helpfully informed us that the voles were currently living here.  As a side note, our best guess as to what kind of dog he is, is that he is a beagle/rat terrier mix.  I have never been so grateful for his superior nose and tracking skills as I was when it came to finding the voles (and thank heavens, he’s only interesting in finding them, NOT eating them).  So, since Kirby said they were here, we dug this up first.
 How gross is that?  The roots were completely gone and the plants were basically just laying on the surface of the ground.  We scooped them up and went around the entire back of the house getting rid of EVERYTHING that was near the house.  Confident we had that under control, we went about our business until we figured out what to do about the voles permanently (the most effective way to take care of them is to put poison in their holes, but we’re obviously really concerned about the consequences to the dogs if we do that).

We got a nasty surprise on Friday…the voles had came around to the front of the house.  The only thing alive in the front?  Some tulips and daffodils that sprouted up.  I guess these were screaming the Voles’ name.
 Great. Well, the war is on voles.  You are going down once and for all.  We spent the ENTIRE weekend ripping up the rest of the landscaping.
 Like I said, the landscaping wasn’t much to look at anyway…so we probably would have gotten around to doing this even without the voles.
 During mission “rip everything up”, we discovered the 2nd dirty little secret, in an effort to fix the drainage problem, someone in the prior 3 sets of owners decided the solution to this was to dump a lot of rock near the house.  Well duh, that encourages drainage, so this is definitely a long-term concern for our basement staying dry.  We added “fix the dirt/drainage” to the scope of our project.  First thing first, we had to get all of the rock out.
We bought ourselves a 2 wheel wheelbarrow and I can’t even believe how much easier it was to haul rock with than a single wheel wheelbarrow.  I could have never hauled that much rock by myself without a catastrophic tip (and yes, this has happened).  We took all our rock and plopped it in the driveway.
Next step?  We needed some dirt.  Using some string, a level, and a bit of trigonometry, we figured that we needed to bring the dirt level up about 5 inches by the house and then slope down from there to the sidewalk.  After doing some research (seriously, we research everything we do to death since we have a lot of DIY “theory” but minimal application experience), we found out that it was cheaper to rent a UHaul utility trailer and get bulk dirt than it was to buy bags of dirt at Lowe’s/Home Depot.  We ended up getting 2 tons of dirt (in 2 trips for safe hauling reasons) to fill in around the house.
There, much better on the drainage (though it made it apparent how badly we need to fix our slanted sidewalk).  We put landscape fabric over it right away to keep the dirt in place (and we were racing the clock against predicted rain…don’t worry it FINALLY rained last night, so we really had plenty of time).

We ended up cutting the retaining wall down a bit to avoid having to fill in too much dirt.  We are going to leave all of our landscaping void of anything for the next year or so until we’re confident the vole problem is eliminated.  Yes, I’m sad that I won’t get to plant a garden, but it’s a price we’re willing to pay to take care of this problem once and for all!
 We ended up capturing 7 or so voles on the side of the house, they were trying to get away from us as we were digging up the dirt.  Steve also had to re-trench the ground for the drainage pipe (the voles were using the prior pipe as a supplement to their home and had eaten holes in it).  The entire side of our house was mulched, which is their heaven, so we knew the mulch also needed to go as soon as possible.

It was a very labor intensive weekend, but it had to be done.  It rained last night to wash our rocks off for us (thanks Mother Nature) so hopefully it will be nice enough some night this week to get the rock back in place.  I will keep you posted on our vole battle, since Sunday we haven’t seen a single new tunnel, so we’re hoping they are already on their way out!

I {heart} Hand Me Downs!

You may remember back to the house tour, we had a pretty massive fridge…don’t remember?  Here’s a reminder:

The prior owners did not leave us a fridge, so we were left to fend for ourselves on that one.  As we investigated fridges (with similar intensity as the dishwasher), we became unsure of what we would want.  Having only had apartment standard fridges, we were overwhelmed with the options.  We were also overwhelmed by the number of exterior projects we were going to have to take on and really didn’t want to have to try to budget for a fridge.  We had talked about trying to buy one off Craigslist to patch us through a few years when my parents decided they were going to get a new french door fridge.  They offered their old fridge if we wanted it.  The funny thing about our house is it was built the same year as my parents house, so the kitchen had all the same appliances they do.  The fridge is a perfect match to our stove and microwave.  We were happy to take it off their hands…the only catch?  They live 3 hours away and none of us own a truck or trailer!  Hmm…thank goodness my sister and her fiance stepped in to save the day!  Nathanael has a truck and offered to bring it down to us.  HURRAY!  Steve’s parents had an extra mini-fridge that we could borrow in the interim until Nathanael and Kimberly could make their way down with the special delivery.

As the days passed towards the fridge delivery weekend, my parents decided to clean house.  We ended up with their old picnic table, lawn mower, fridge, ladder, a bread maker, and other misc. household items.  They have worked out perfectly in their new home, and it was great to host our official first house guests (though they didn’t have to sleep on air mattresses on top of our icky carpet).  Don’t worry I found the shower curtain before they arrived so they didn’t have to take curtainless showers.
Owning a house is truly a family affair!  We are so grateful for the help of our family members!!

Check out the fridge in it’s new home…ahh, full sized goodness!

New Carpet

I just realized I haven’t told you about our NEW carpet!!!

We FINALLY got our new carpet last Saturday, and it was every bit as exciting as I had hoped!  The installers arrived promptly at 6 a.m. (don’t worry, this is the time I told them to show up) and got right to work.  There were 2 of them to do the whole house, and they made a pretty good system of it.  Before we knew it, the pad was stapled down and ready to go.  The whole process was pretty painless, but I did try to discretely stalk them as they were laying the carpet to get some photos…
 Here is the carpet pad in place and ready to be stapled.  Steve & I danced on when the installer went upstairs to lay the rest of the pad.
 The installer rolling our the carpet.  My first reaction…holy cow, our fireplace is red.  PHEW, I still love the carpet (since I have never ever picked out carpet before, I was terrified it would arrive and I would hate it.  Luckily, it’s as amazing in person as it was on the little sample)
 Living room installation.  I was enthralled watching the guy lay this, I’m pretty sure he thought I was a bit of a creeper because I sat at the breakfast bar and just stared at him…
Stairs with new carpet…do you need a reminder of the before?
BIG change actually, it took us a bit to visually adjust, but we think it looks much more inviting and we love just ploppin’ down on the carpet (heck, after the installers left, I took a 45 minute nap on the living room floor).  All around, we’re excited that the carpet is in place because we’ve finally been able to at least clean out the garage and start unpacking!

I won!!

I recently entered a blog give-away on My So-Called Home for a $25.00 Gift Card to Home Goods….I was super excited today when I found out that I won!!  I’m thinking I am going to put it towards some summery fun mantle decorations (or you know, whatever strikes me when I walk in the door).  I was bummed when Hilary first announced the giveaway since there is not a HomeGoods store in Nebraska, but then I remembered that I will be in St. Louis in a few weeks for a bachelorette party and they have SEVERAL HomeGoods stores.  So I entered and what do you know, a shopping date has been planned with the hubs.  Woo hoo!  Thanks Hilary for the giveaway!

I’m loving this mantle from our humble abode:

I will keep you posted on my finds after we return from the Lou!!

Tales of a New Homeowner: Segment 2

It is now blatantly clear that I am going to have some “lesson learning” along the way.  I have decided to call these segments “Tales of a New Homeowner”.  Catchy huh?  Click here if you missed the first tale and want to catch up.

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So last night, I decided to bite the bullet and clean the oven.  We have yet to use the oven since moving in because it was so gross.  I am regretting that I didn’t take a picture of it in all of its “glory”.  There is some rain in the forecast and we needed a back up plan since we have been cooking exclusively on the grill since moving in.  Steve decided it was time to mow the lawn, leaving me to fend for myself with the oven.  People use self clean all the time, I reasoned, and you don’t hear about THAT on the news, so I went ahead and pushed the self clean button.

1)      I have never used self-clean before.  I was a little concerned about the very LOUD noise the oven made when it locked.  Just to make sure, I tugged on the door, it was really locked.  The timer said the whole process would take 3.5 HOURS…a bit longer than I was expecting, but fine, we already had planned to grill out.

2)      About 30 minutes in to the self clean cycle, the inside of the oven was on fire.  Yes, fire.  I again wish I had taken a picture, but sadly, documenting for my blog was not on my mind.

3)      I stare at it for a good 5 minutes debating the best course of action…my solution is to see if it burns out, but remain waiting by the oven with the fire extinguisher, you know, just in case.

4)      I go for the fire extinguisher and can’t find it under the sink…commence a brief search of the basement and garage before I remember the oven is on fire inside and probably shouldn’t be unattended.  Though without a fire extinguisher, my supervision is really only symbolic….

5)      I then stuck my head outside to see if I could find Steve.  The mower is smack in the middle of the yard, off, but he is nowhere to be found.  All the cars are in the garage, as is the gas can, and his bicycle.

6)      Return my attention once again to the internal flaming oven…decide to panic a bit since I hate fire (seriously, I won’t even light a match).  Decide I should send the dogs outside so they won’t burn in the now imminent oven explosion

7)      Call my mom to tell her my oven is on fire…She assures me it will probably burn out on its own and that in the future, I should remove large chunks of unknown food products before I push the button.  I tell her I’m never self cleaning again.  If someone called me to tell me their oven was on fire, I’m not sure I would have thought to ask them such thorough follow up questions.

8)      The fire goes out after another 20 minutes or so, there may have been a panicked voicemail to Steve that our house was going to burn down in his absence.

9)      Steve comes inside.  Apparently, while mowing, a chunk of our fence broke.  He went to ask the neighbor’s permission to go in their yard to fix the fence.  She then talked his ear off about the neighbor history and gossip for approximately the entire time my oven debacle was going on.

10)   I spent the remaining 2.5 HOURS sitting at our island thing staring at the oven so I could take care of any potential problems (probably in a similar manner I took care of the prior problem, by doing NOTHING).  The rest of the cycle was uneventful.  The oven is now “clean”…ish?  but really just looks full of…soot?  Not sure, I need to wipe it out I think.

..and yes, I emailed this story to all of my friends today before deciding it would probably be something I would want to document in my blog to reflect upon later.  Happy Wednesday!

Linked up to Kreative Korner.

Tale 3 here.

and now, I am going to blog about our toilets.

Yes, first I blog about a ladder and now I am writing a post devoted to the toilet.  I figure, we all use ‘em, we better give ‘em a little press, right?

We have 3 toilets in our house…the 1/2 bath toilet on the first floor, the main bath on the 2nd floor, and the master bedroom.  We had been warned by numerous home owning friends that there would be something ridiculous happen when we first moved in ranging from all the lightbulbs simultaneously burning out to the water pipes bursting.  We braced ourselves going in and discovered that we were one of the lucky ones.  Our weird first home ownership experience was in fact all of our toilet handles breaking off.  I guess our house’s prior occupants were hard flushers?  And to clarify, the handle wasn’t just broken off the chain or anything, it fell off on to the floor.

Off we went to the hardware store in search of a new handle.  When we got there, there was a plethora of options (who knew there were so many kinds of toilet flushing apparatuses) and as we were mulling them over, I spied this on the shelf
It was $10.00 more than the toilet handle (so a grand total of $19.99) and I have been mildly obsessed with having a button to flush my toilet ever since I read this post on Young House Love.  It saves water and BEST OF ALL, there is no handle jiggling and no chain to get stuck.  It promised to install in 10 minutes, and you know what, following the instructions, it lived up to the promise!

Reading the instructions is key to this….
Install from the top
Remember – push button 1 for #1 and button 2 for #2!

This is pretty slick, and it really does use less water, PLUS it’s fully adjustable if button #1 isn’t giving you the water you need, you can adjust it on up!  I’m officially a button toilet fan!  I have heard this don’t really work if you already have a low-flow toilet, but we have the original 15 year old toilet, so no risk of that here.  If you are thinking about this easy conversion, I’m a fan